


Memento Vivere

by ThirteenthHour



Category: The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types
Genre: Easterlings - Freeform, Gen, Haradrim - Freeform, ex-nazgul, if you hadn't nailed it to the perch it'd be pushing up daisies, ringwraith - Freeform, wandering the ass end of Mordor like a drunk tarantula in an earthquake
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-07-24
Updated: 2013-08-02
Packaged: 2017-12-21 05:08:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/896150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThirteenthHour/pseuds/ThirteenthHour
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Of the Nine Walkers, there was one who fell; of the Nine Riders, there was one who lived.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> JRR Tolkien made the grave mistake of giving the second of the Ringwraiths a name and origin and nothing further. Having apparently spent the last year or so incubating this knowledge, the non-euclidean plot bunny warren of my brain has seen fit to divulge this.

Khamul woke, and thought _I am alive._

Slowly, other thoughts worked their way up through the sludge of four thousand years. Scents had dimmed, leaving him blind. The world shook intermittently. It was very bright and very blnk, and the first of those thoughts, an indefinite time after _I am alive_ , which had for millennia formed a lonely refrain, was that he should open his eyes.

The next was that he remembered pain. The world was even brighter now and the sun drove spikes into eyes long accustomed not only to the dark, but to senses altogether Other. Beside that, the abrasion of sand driven up under parched lids mattered little.

He curled around that pain, because muscles which he suspected were themselves a memory remembered reflex. He fell; once more the world caught him, in twisted spiky hands, and further pain tore loose from his throat. What started as a scream emerged a rattle. He hadn't breathed in four millennia, but now he choked on dust and cobwebs until the pain grew _sticky_ and when he could breathe again, each outward breath was a knife under the breastbone and he knew the great gnarled finger jutting skyward inches from his lips was sticky, too, from the tang of salt and iron.

Dazed and dim, he reached out to touch the dark smear. Under his palm he felt blood and dry dead bark.

_I am alive._

_I am in a tree._

He lay in the tree's withered, thorny hands, staring at his own hand on its limb. Both were blurry - five dark fingers upon darker blood against pale bark; everything beyond that, only dim shapes under the bright agony of sky.

He was alive. The tree wasn't. He mourned for it.

Yet more thoughts unearthed themselves. The pale spike half-seen to his right was not another thorn after all, but part of the bone of his arm, and the huge rattle behind him was the breath of some immense creature, suffering. 

Khamul turned, with great effort, to look at it. Its dark bulk lay partly in the tree and partly strewn across the ground. He knew without seeing it clearly that it was his, and that it was dying. Though other pains awakened as he moved, he worked his way over to it, leaving scraps of flesh and rotting cloth on sun-bleached thorns.

At last he came to the nearest extent of the fell beast. He'd fallen twice, or thrice, perhaps more. Perhaps he remembered the same time twice...it didn't matter enough to keep track, with thoughts so slippery, and his right arm hung useless at his side, while his left had grown all but numb with lacertions and at first did not recognise the touch of scales underneath it. Stretched taut over shredded membrane, they felt almost like bark. 

If the beast felt, it gave no sign, but as Khamul lay stretched across dead branches the wind tugged at its wing in obscene imitation of flight. Khamul felt very small and very cold. He held his breath to keep from choking on a pain entirely separate from shattered bones and torn skin, eyes full of sand and lungs full of dust.

When that pain released its initial grip he half slid, half fell down the length of the beast. The ground received him with a dreadfully final wet crunch; he didn't feel it, yet, but it stunned him for a moment. The bright sky faded to black.

He woke to a scaly nose touching his side. The beast's laboured breath curled around him, stinking of blood, and without opening his eyes, he lifted his good hand to touch its muzzle. It nuzzled in, poor thing. The wraith must have been kind to it. Its blood misted against his skin as it choked out another breath.

"I'm sorry," he rasped, but that too died half-born. He let his hand drop so he could use it to press himself upright. His broken arm grated against itself, dragging on the rocky earth. Each point of contact felt like a needle, but his helplessly curled fingertips brushed against the hilt of his sword and the contrast in texture verged on exquisite. 

Steel armour under rotting silk chafed his face and he realised that he'd sagged forward over his knees. His own breath rasped and gurgled and the sun hammered down on him, but just sitting there would do no good. Even once he forced his good hand to wrap around the sword's hilt and then to draw it - broken at the tip, but functional for his purpose - he couldn't stand, though he tried to use it for a prop, as his long-dead and half-remembered mother had taught him to never, ever do.

Instead he dragged himself along the beast's head until he could slump against the curve behind its jaw. It butted feebly against him. He rasped softly, leaned the sowrd against its armoured neck, and stroked his hand along the much thinner, sensitive skin of the hollow behind its jaw. 

He still wanted to tell it he was sorry. He wanted to tell it what he was about to do, and why. He wanted to tell it that it hadn't been bad, even though the wraith he had been was bad, and the tyrant who made both wraith and beast.

Since he couldn't speak, he settled for stroking its neck until the muscles relaxed as much as its breathing would allow. Then he drove the sword up through the base of its skull into its brain, fast, before it had time to tense. It was easy, so easy. All he had to do was fall against the crossguard, and falling came easier than sitting. The beast shuddered once and lay still.

Its blood flooded out over his hand, down his arm, over his chest and lap and pooled amongst the gravel between his knees. Khamul let his hand slide down from the hilt of his sword and allowed the sky to press him down. He hid his face in his hand and would have wept but that his body didn't hold enough water for tears. After awhile, he faded once more into unconsciousness.


	2. Chapter 2

When he woke, the sky had grown dimmer, and he was cold. It left him numb enough about the edges that pain stayed quiet until he moved. Relief flooded him, when it stirred - it told him that he hadn't slipped back into the horrible thing of black shrouds and someone else's vicious will where all of himself lay in his name and the thought _I am alive._

He was alive. He heard his own raspy breath and felt it hurt. He was alive. The thorny tree was not. The fell beast, poor thing, was not. Its blood lay cold across his lap and at his back its body cooled. And Sauron...

He unfurled his mind tentatively from its tenacious little curl of existence. No iron hand held it. No awful will stirred itself to dominate all save that granule too small for it to crush - too small, perhaps, for it to see. He was alive, and Sauron was not. He was free. He wondered if he should have felt lost.

It seemed such a silly thing to wonder that he pushed himself to sit upright out of sheer indignation and glared mulishly into the distance for a few breaths. The beast lay dead behind him; the thorny tree would grow no deader. Sauron, whom he had never loved or meant to serve, was gone.

For four thousand years, he had reminded himself _I am Khamul. I am alive,_ with no goal in mind, because so often it had been the only scrap of mind he _had_. Even when more accrued around it, none had aspired to anything so grandiose as hope. Had the idea of _after Sauron_ even occurred to him?

Regardless, he had not spent so much time reminding himself that he was alive in order to sit in the desert and wait to die beside the ruin of a creature who had trusted him. Poor thing...

He steadied himself with his good hand, and regarded it unflinchingly. It lay lifeless and monumental; a cold knot tied itself inside him. Had it been dying, when he woke, of the injuries incurred in its fall, or had it fallen _because_ it was dying? If he'd had anything in his stomach, he would have vomited. If it had already been dying, so much else was lost.

Deep in the badlands of Mordor, beside its wide salt sea, the wraith Khamul had kept his citadel, carven into a volcano which had long since banked its fires and gone to sleep. Whitin, lit by will-o-wisps and housed in basalt shelves stretching from floor to ceiling - and some halls reached up for miles into the lofty darkness, or down and down until the very shadows grew hot - dwelt a library drawn from all reaches of the East and many of the West; knowledge sacred, ordinary and arcane; poetry in tongues new-born and long-dead; stories of strange gods and everyday people, written in scroll or codex, chiselled into tablets, bored into long dry reeds in the hollow alphabet of the shy little orcs of the southeastern salt-marshes.

As King and Nazgul alike, he had absolutely forbidden two things - torture, in any form, and the deliberate destruction of art or knowledge. And so his troops had brought these things to him in tribute, things made and written, stories spoken and recorded. As a living king, he'd kept them all, the bright silks, the paintings, the gems and fantastic regalia, but after he fell, any cloth he wore turned to black rags, and the colours faded until he could not call to mind what they had looked like and, at last, almost forgot that there was such a thing as colour.

Those too lived on in the depths of his citadel. He gave them as favours to his generals, or to brilliant or hard-working librarians, or those who brought him special treasures. Most of all he gave them to those who played the instruments brought from round the world, or read to him in his high tower; for all his power, the wraith had not the sight of mortals, and could not read. 

These people, like the lost things they curated, came from everywhere or nowhere - people who had no where else to be, or who loved lore more than company. Perhaps they wore the bright rich silks or hung the paintings in their little rooms. Perhaps they fucked on velvet blankets exquisitely embroidered for an empress worshipped as the voice of the Valar. Someone ought to draw joy from such things. Khamul lined the long black corridors, between shelves or framed amongst them, with statuary and with richly textured tapestry. Touch, at least, remained to him. He wondered now if the librarians had appreciated it, too.

There was so little he had known of these folk, who had been his last. He remembered, clear as a bug in amber, a cluster of acolytes - were they called that? - laughing in a doorway, but he knew that after a while, no one spoke above a whisper save for the long lean angular black cats with their caterwauling voices who hunted vermin amongst the stacks. It had been a city, in its own right, and the ghost-lights stretching up in the high halls looked like well-tidied stars.

If Sauron's fall had broken the beast, then what of the library? He could not feel any of the seven other wraiths remaining when that bond had shattered, but that didn't mean they'd ceased existing. Could one keep oneself alive by sheer stubbornness?

Alive, alive, he was alive. His hand shook convulsively on the dead beast's neck, and the fact that he couldn't remember putting it there terrified him, but the effort it cost helped him concentrate, so there he left it while forcing his train of thought to carry through.

Either Sauron's fall had destroyed all sustained primarily through his power, in which case Khamul was alone and his library and the lives of all within it likely in ruin - much, he knew, had been built upon the skill of Men and Dwarves under his command but some had hinged upon his own power and, thus, Sauron's. If not, then the other seven might still be, in what condition, and with what remaining humanity, he didn't know. Some part of him wondered how final the Witch-King's death might be, and horror tightened the knot inside him. The other seven had lost their memories, their lives, their names, but they had not yet lost their terror of that one. Neither had he.

He swallowed bile and forced himself to calm. If the end of Sauron had only severed connections, rather than destroying things he'd wrought, then panic was baseless. If the end of Sauron _had_ brought what he'd made crashing down, then it was worse than useless - so, in all honesty, was he, but he had to try. Where the other seven might be, he couldn't begin to say, but his citadel, at least, he could find, eventually, somehow.

His hand hurt. Dragging in a final calming breath, as deeply as he could, Khamul forced his eyes open. It still felt like he had half of Mordor stuck under his lids, but at least he could focus better than he had before, enough to see nails peeled and broken, oozing blood, from trying to cling to unforgiving scales. As he flexed his cramping fingers, his hand shook hard enough to jar all the broken parts of him.

It wrung a raspy whimper out of him, but also cleared the remaining fog from his mind. He had somewhere to go, and, though he lacked any idea where he _was_ , he had no excuse to stay there. Sooner or later, he would find...something, and that would be a start.


	3. Chapter 3

What he found was emptiness. Sauron had been the lodestone of a compass forever pointed toward Barad-Dur. Khamul, after a time, remembered the sun; remembered where it set and where it rose, and that its movements caused the sky to grow bright or dark. He remembered night and day, but the first time he thought to look to the sky for direction, the pain of its brightness skewered him to the ground in a shaking heap and he had to drag himself until he could no longer manage even that. Sometime after that, he faded back into consciousness and lay, shivering, wondering when he had left it and _why_ he was shivering.

When realisation set in, he laughed hoarsely in delight, curling raw fingers in the rough rock. Night had settled. Had any water been in this place, it would have frozen. It was night, and he was cold, like the librarians heavily clad in the high reaches of his citadel. For so long he'd barely recalled even the concept of heat and chill, save for the searing touch of fire.

It was night, though, and he _was_ cold, and he remembered fire - not only consuming flames, but a candle in a windowsill, a campfire purring to itself amongst glowing logs; and he remembered water, as rain falling on his upturned face, not just as a threat of rushing torrents; and he remembered navigation by the sky...he remembered stars.

He had reassembled himself with scraps of armour - his and the beast's - and torn rags and broken branches, until his body would, however unsteadily, bear his weight, and simply started walking, or crawling, or dragging himself, away. Away from the ruin of the beast, though its death-stench caught him up and trailed him for he didn't know how long, and toward whatever he might find. He tried to focus on the toward and here, here was something. He lived, and began to recall the trappings of life.

He pushed himself upright, one-armed, and gazed around, wondering, now, at the strange sensation of his face smiling. The stars were still too bright to look at long, and he could not focus well enough to see them individually - the sky would not serve as compass tonight, but that could wait.

That would have to wait, he thought heavily, touching chapped lips with a tongue dry as a bird's as the surprising smile faded. Knowing which direction he faced wouldn't tell him where he was, or whether he went toward or away from the library-citadel. Besides, "away from the death-stink" made surer proof against stumbling in circles than the changing sky would do. Khamul sighed, wincing at the little jolts of pain, and, taking hold of the strong but twisted bough he'd taken for a prop, dragged himself upright and kept going, ever further from the great dead creature and the broken Morgul blade that marked its resting place.

Remembering night and day only as abstract concepts, spoken in the cadence of endless anonymous librarians reading aloud, he'd kept no track of the sky's changes. It chafed a little not to know how long he had traversed the desert thus far, less for its own sake than because it eliminated any chance of estimating how long since Sauron's fall.

He kept track now, though. The fragment of armour splinting his broken arm had sharp edges. With it he kept tally, in the skin of his other arm. It hurt but little beside everything else, and the ritual, every day as the sky grew dark, helped centre him. Otherwise he could not have kept track of something so intangible as numbers, or days, not when half the time he little noticed whether he walked or crawled. Sometimes, staring blankly at a barren stone inches from his face or into a horizon like a dragon's spine, he wondered if he was missing something that the living did, that he ought to need, since he was alive.

_He was alive_.

Sometimes he wept, helplessly, without tears, without sound save for the occasional muffled gasp of pain, into his hand. He was alive. He was alive, and when he could move again, he kept going, night and day.

On the sixteenth day, he watched the sun set, unblinking, from between splayed fingers, and stowed away another gem of life returning. He smiled, and his cracked lips bled, and after a moment he gave a decisive little nod and kept going, west by northwest.

On the thirty-eighth day, he found water. Five sunrises ago, he had tripped over a root - long dead, but the first sign of life since the thorny tree, and herald of more. Lichens, at first, clinging to the shaded southern sides of stones; then scrubby brushes and furtive clumps of grass; and, with them, foreshadowings of animals rustling through the night and, now and then, a sinuous silence through dark hours grown loud with life, a snake.

Snakes bite, if you come upon them too quickly for them to slide off, and he'd seen strong hale folk die of venom or simply grow ill as infection set in. Nonetheless, even once it occurred to him to be leery of them, his pulse failed to jolt or race as they slid past. Perhaps he knew too well that his stumbling gait gave plenty of warning, but he found it likelier that a threat so mundane as venom held little fear after the Witch-King. 

By day, the snakes tucked themselves away underground, like all the other creatures save an occasional scuttling scorpion. Khamul alone moved under the sun, which scorched his skin until it cracked and oozed. Sometimes the heat roiled his stomach, but mostly, the heat just was, like the snakes.

It was the flood of noise and movement, the scent and touch of life, that made him twitch and jump and shudder, and finally cling to a trunk or boulder lest the current pull him under . He couldn't call it fear, per se, but an awe akin to terror. In those vibrant nights, he felt like he was drowning, and loathed himself for all the hours he wasted wadded at the foot of some jutting rock, shuddering and keening into his balled up hand. 

The days did not come so close to drowning him. Down pounded the sun, driving spikes into his eyes, but that he could deal with. Pain had become so constant a companion that he hardly noticed, though the first time it turned itself into some strange thing writhing inside him, leaving him retching blood and dead spiders while his vision pulsated with bizarre shapes and smears of light, frightened him more than anything since Sauron's fall, not for the pain but for the awful familiarity of his senses metamorphosizing.

_No, no, not this, not this again..._

But it passed, and left him shaken but still alive, still corporeal, still more Khamul than not. Every time it returned it shook him to the core, but never so badly as that first time. It was while trying to will away one of those spells that he stumbled across, or rather into, the spring which gave rise to all this life. 

Had he been whole he would have leapt back. He fell back instead and sat, staring, panting, and wryly flexing a bruised elbow (there was nothing to be done for his bruised ass) at the shallow pool of clear water. Its fresh sweet mineral smell washed over him and his rock-flayed feet stung with a welcome tang of cold. Though it trickled out from under a lip of basalt, it flowed over a paler stone with elegant bands a bit like the striations of wood and Khamul, dragging his gaze up from the place where it emerged to focus foggily downstream, saw that he'd come to the edge of the lava floes that had dominated the terrain.

Strangest of all, because it ran counter to eons of instinct, the scent of water enticed him. With set jaw, thin lips and a white-knuckled grip on the acacia branch, he hauled himself upright again and stood, swaying, staring at the water. It more than enticed. It drew him as if by a thin strong cord knotted around the centre of him, just behind the breastbone, where no cord had been knotted since Sauron fell. It compelled him.

He choked off a keening cry and forcibly placed his staff at his side, where it belonged, rather than as an inadequate shield before him, and marshalled his thoughts back to a semblance of rationality. Cool and clean, the water beckoned - beckoned him to do _what_? The sensation that he was missing something ceased simply following him in order to nip sharply at his heels. He hobbled half a step closer to the water's edge, shuddered and stopped.

The fear that gnawed him sprung from the wraith. The same part of him that had for eons insisted he was alive bade him defy the wraith's terror in order to prove that it no longer bound him, and the feeling of something missing had grown frantic, but that very compulsion deterred him. Not for nothing had Sauron been called the Deceiver. 

Five slow heartbeats passed while he stared into the water. He had decided to go until he found something and here, for the first time, he had found something, tangible, individual, profoundly significant. It haunted him, but he could bide his time in answering it. In the meantime, he followed the water.


End file.
